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Connection: The Bell WiMAX is one of the best wireless internet, (Other than LTE) in the Simcoe Region. My family had this internet for over 3 years now, and it can go up to 400kb/s (4Mb) in download speed. You can download a 700 Mb movie in 30 minutes with this internet. But about 2 years ago, the WiMAX started to have MAJOR lag throughout the day. For a while, it would be 65-200 Ms, then it would go up to 500, 1000, 2000, or even 3000 Ms for about 20 minutes, or even for 2-5 hours. This is a serious problem that Bell has, and they haven't fix it. We even tried calling support, and they can't do anything at all. When the internet is fast, you can easily go gaming on this. Installation: The Bell WiMAX is one of the most simplest thing to install. Even an 8 year old can do this. You just need the WiMAX it self, then find a place in your house (Find a corner of a room that is pointing to your closest Bell WiMAX sending tower.), plug it in. Get an Ethernet wire, plug it into the WiMax, and into your computer, or router. And you have internet my good sir. (I hope.) Pricing: Unless you want to spend 75 dollars for 1.25 Mb connection from Zing (If you live near them.) This is the best choice. It's cheap, fast when there is no lag issues, and there is non Contract terms. Why it's is #1 on my list of wireless internet: Because it is unlimited. Well, I'm guessing because the Bell website says: "Internet usage: 30 GB of bandwidth per month", but my family go way over that sometimes, and we never had extra charges, but I'm not 100% sure. Thanks, Son588. member for 10.8 years, 70 visits, last login: 2 years ago updated 10.8 years ago
Bell Mobility provides excellent technical support and connection reliability. They are probably the best in the business technically. Rogers may come second. Bell has made certain the Bell Mobility division operates at peak performance, technically and with personnel. They are as good or better than advertised. Simply not as competitive as the others in the market on pricing. Rogers provides better pricing with similar technology, albeit Bell edges them out technically. It is the old story, "You get what you pay for!" I like Bell Mobility, even if it is a few pennies more - their technology and support is FANTASTIC! member for 15.6 years, 195 visits, last login: 10 years ago updated 11.5 years ago
Landline broadband was not available in this rural neighbourhood. Choice was between a wi-fi company which had an install/equipment fee of $400+ and Bell Canada's cellular service which shipped a cellular router via postal service for the user to install. The router was purchased over the internet + phone for $149 on a 2-year contract and easily installed by the user. The Bell coverage, even in this remote rural area is NOW reliable** and generally provides DL speeds of 3 to 4 mbs with a small user-installed external antenna, in spite of a heavily-treed neighbourhood. The cell tower is approximately 8 Km away. The main drawback now is the "bandwidth" - 3gig for $35 -above that it's $45, if over 5gig it jumps to $60. Over 10 gig it becomes 15 cents per megabit! Still, except for dial-up's unlimited bandwidth, it is far preferable. Details: »www.bell.ca/shopping/Tur ··· sku=THUB ** reliability: The first 4 months were a nightmare of continual 2 to 5 minute timeouts, sometimes 3 or 4 every hour. By late December, Bell had stabilized their cellular network problems, and so far, for the past month the network has been consistently reliable here. UPDATE! DECEMBER, 2011- I am now into 18 months of my 2 year contract with the Ericsson W35 turbohub. The only time it has recently "slowed down" was in late November 2011, when WET HEAVY STICKY snow covered all the tree branches in my neighbourhood. But even then, the only thing that degraded was the UPLOAD speed - from 1+mbs down to 100kbs. and the ping slowed also - Due to (I think) wet snow on my small yagi. Obviously I need some bigger transmit power. Once the snow melted off, situation resumed normally. Even with lots of snow on the trees. Presumably a stronger transmitter on my turbohub would have at least melted the snow on the antenna! Al in all, the Turbohub is GREAT! ... EXCEPT! For the pricey "bandwidth", which is a bitch! Location: N45.004501, W74.24253 .... Elgin Quebec. AND- Some 3rd-party dorks (really!) are soon gonna put-up a Bell cellular tower at the BOTTOM of a hill near me! Wow. What a rip-off! Are you listening, Bell? Yeah, yeah- I know- my only alternative is dial-up...:-( member for 17.6 years, 234 visits, last login: 3.1 years ago updated 12.2 years ago
This service was provided to me in a temporary apartment which I paid $3000 per month for. I used the service for 4 months. (today is the last day, I am moving) Daily there is a 4 hour window that the service bogs down for. This window occurs at random times. Service slows to a 60 second wait to open any web page, and sometimes disconnects completely for up to 6 hours. Service interruptions occur at least 3 times weekly. When the service works, dl speed is less than 600kb/s, and upload at 150kb/s. Customer service is unable to identify the problem, has rebooted modem remotely, sent techs (2 times), and replaced the modem. The have used excuses like "the head office is re-routing" and they cannot explain what that means. This is the crappiest internet i have ever had, and I seriously do not recommend it. member for 13 years, 1 visits, last login: 13 years ago updated 13 years ago
Ashton Ontario (that's near Ottawa). I had 2 months free, 2 year contract. Cancellation penalty $110 gets less over time. Outdoor modem, attached on tower (that I already had), free install - at least, it was for me. So, the risk to the customer was nil. The alternative here is Xplornet, but they want 3 year contract with $450 cancellation penalty (!!!). Free install though. They also double-nat, which means you'll pay $10 extra for static ip to get around this. Speed often drops to very slow speeds and very long lag times (latency). Ping times can easily approach 4000 ms (that's close to FOUR seconds). Forget about videoing - it SUCKS if you want to share baby videos with the parents... Download speed varies between 20KB/s to 250KB/s. Sometimes it flies at 200+KB/s and latency well below 100ms. But most of the time I get around 800ms latency and 75KB/s download give or take. There are also packet loss problems - and that can really suck. Because that means connections have to be re-established. TCP connections need to re-send packets to reach the remote site (and back again). The result is sites not coming down very slowly with major delays before anything begins. Sometimes it becomes completely unusable. Bell oversells their networks. Too many people on a tower. They even admit this over the phone. Some of them don't tell you a damn thing, others admit it flat out. There's nothing I can do. I refuse to go to Xplornet, and get stuck with a 3 year contract, only to find out that I might face the same crappy speeds and delay times, and then getting stuck with a FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLAR cancellation penalty. I've written letters to Xplornet that their business model is just plain dumb. They absolutely do not give a damn. So now what? I'm sticking with Bell because I don't know what else to do. Rumor has it that a box down the country road is old and IF it ever gets replaced, we actually might get DSL out here. I'm considering getting a snow mobile just for that, and I might run that box down at 3am in the winter some time... just kidding... member for 15.6 years, 60 visits, last login: 12.2 years ago updated 13.9 years ago
This is Bell Mobilities 3G EVDO network with a "turbo-stick" (Novatel U760 modem). This essentially uses Bell's cell phone network. It has been around for a while but was not cost effective for general internet access. It was priced more for cell phone web surfing and smart phones (e.g. dollars per megabyte). What has changed is that Bell has reduced the cost by a 100 times. You can now get access to the internet (any IP connection, not just email and web) for pennies per megabyte. The cost structure per month, AFAICT, inclusing 911 and system access fee, but not taxes: 10$ - less than 25MB that month 37.70$ - less than 500MB (about 6 cents/MB) 42.70$ - less than 1GB (about 3.5 cents/MB) 57.70$ - less than 2GB (about 2.5 cents/MB) 72.70$ - less than 3GB (about 2.2 cents/MB) 92.70$ - less than 5GB (about 1.7 cents/MB) after that it's 3 cents/MB There is a 35$ sign up fee. The USB modem was free with a 12 month contract - otherwise 175$ So it's fine for general web surfing and e-mail, but not if you're a fan of youtube and bitTorrents. It's also good for just having for occational away-from-home internet access as there is a maximum 10$/mo if you don't use it, or only use it occationally for e-mail. I live in the country side where no DSL is available. There are 3 ISPs in my area that offer line-of-sight microwave but one is very expensive (RipNet) and we can't see the towers of the other two. So far this is the only cost effective solution for our internet needs. So far it works great - I get from 30KB/s to 80KB/s downloads - works fine with VPN to my work, including VoIP. Ping is in the 50-100ms range. member for 14.7 years, 1 visits, last login: 364 days ago updated 14.6 years ago
It is currently the only feasible "high speed" service offered rurally. The connection is unreliable. Peak times are brutally slow, and you can forget the connection all together in poor weather. Customer service always ends with booking a technician to come to the house. Billing issues are the usual nightmare with Bell. All around it is extremely poor value for the money. member for 17.8 years, 3 visits, last login: 10.7 years ago updated 14.8 years ago
This is the 3Mbps "Wimax Unplugged" Bell Sympatico service with a 10GB/month data allowance for a total of $55/month. For a little context I had Teksavvy DSL for several years before moving to a new location where DSL was not available. My experience with Teksavvy was very positive - they set and outstanding example for support quality, network performance and cost. I was loath to return to Bell but as it turned out I only had two wireless high speed options (Bell and Xplornet) and Bell was likely to be the better option. The Bell website told me I could not get Wimax Unplugged service, but could get "Wimax In-home" 2Mbps service (for a $200 installation charge). Fortunately my neighbour already had Wimax Unplugged service and since I was closer to the basestation than he was it was pretty certain I would be able to get service as well. There are no installation charges for Wimax Unplugged since it is a customer install - the modem sits somewhere inside your house where it can get good signal strength (probably by a window). I purchased the modem from Bestbuy for $100, although if you call Bell to order service you can rent the modem for $10/month and they will send the modem by mail (much like DSL). The installation process has the potential to be very simple. although the simplified instruction booklet was a little too simplified - it left out some important details. As a result my service was up and down for a couple of days while I made support calls and it was a total of about 4 days before the service was fully working and stable. The support centre for Wimax Unplugged is not the usual Bell support centre and the representatives appear to have a good working knowledge of the system. They were able to go in and deal directly with detailed issues, rather than reading from some banal script. Since I work from home regularly using VPN access to my workplace network I consider the 10GB/month allowance a bit low and compared to Teksavvy it is less than generous, although standard Bell fare. Working from home I have noticed that network performance during the day is acceptable but degrades significantly from 4pm to about 9 or 10pm. Any kind of video performs quite badly any time of day. The degradation in the evening is so significant that gmail is often inaccessable on imap or smtp for several minutes at a time. Websites may take minutes to load. In my opinion this degradation is unlikely to be a Wimax problem, but more of a core Bell network problem (but seemingly limited to Bell customers since Teksavvy performance was fine - at least up until a month ago when Bell started throttling wholesale customers as well). Overall I consider the service acceptable since my high speed choices are so limited, but the cost is very high for service that is slower than DSL and has significant periods of degraded operation. member for 15.7 years, 2 visits, last login: 15.1 years ago updated 15.7 years ago |